Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

The Trojan royal house traces itself to Dardanus, son of Zeus by Electra daughter of Atlas (one of the Pleiads). Apollodorus and Homeric genealogy place him as first ancestor whom Zeus loved in the Troad’s line. In the fuller migration lore (Dionysius; earlier Atthidographers and island traditions), Dardanus left Samothrace—where the mysteries of the Great Gods and his sister Harmonia’s connections sometimes attach—and crossed to the Asian mainland opposite. There, on the slopes of Ida in the land of King Teucer (son of the river Scamander and the nymph Idaea), he founded Dardania above the later site of Troy. Teucer welcomed him; Dardanus married Teucer’s daughter Bateia (or Arisbe) and inherited or shared the rule; from him the people were called Dardanians. Homer’s Aeneas, recounting his lineage to Achilles, begins with Zeus’s son Dardanus who founded Dardania when sacred Ilios was not yet built in the plain. The entry catalogues that foundation: divine paternity, Atlas-line mother, Idaean settlement, and the ethnic name that precedes Ilus’s walled city.